There are a whole LOT of blogs out there! As the blogosphere gets larger, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find good feeds. “FTM! Feeds That Matter” is a prototype service that was developed out of a need for find interesting feeds on a topic.

The system was built by analyzing the publicly listed Bloglines feed subscriptions. For details, see Feeds That Matter: A Study of Bloglines Subscriptions and some of the related posts here and here. Using the subscription information, we describe techniques to induce an intuitive set of topics for feeds and blogs. These topic categories, and their associated feeds, are key to a number of blog-related applications, including the compilation of a list of feeds that matter for a given topic. The site FTM! site was implemented to help users browse and subscribe to an automatically generated catalog of popular feeds for different topics.